SharePoint Virtualization Support

The 2007 wave of SharePoint products—which includes Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) and MOSS 2007—was the first to gain broad virtualization support from Microsoft. However, in production, most clients opt to virtualize only the web role and sometimes the query role. Other roles weren’t typically implemented, for various reasons. For example, the index role was often implemented only on physical hardware because of heavy processor and memory constraints and the limitation in SharePoint 2007 of one index server per shared services provider.

Microsoft’s official SharePoint 2010 support stance is that any SharePoint role or service is supported for hardware virtualization. SharePoint 2010 is positioned as an excellent virtualization candidate because of virtualization technology advances and a reduction of the disk input/output (I/O) requirements for the indexing and search components. In addition, advances in hardware virtualization make it easier to virtualize I/O-intensive applications such as SQL Server, allowing the SharePoint database role to be more easily virtualized. As a result, many organizations are looking at virtualizing their new SharePoint 2010 farms.